What We Should Learn From the Shooting Death of Harambe

Gorillas are smart, so let's use their intelligence to prevent future tragedies

By now, most people are probably aware of the shooting death of a silverback gorilla at the Cincinnati Zoo. A three year old loudly announced to his mother that he was going to join "the gorilla in the water", and did just that when his mother was temporarily distracted. He crawled through a substantial barrier and dropped down a 15-foot wall into the gorilla's enclosure, landing in a foot of water. Two females gorillas responded to the zoo attendant's call to return to their indoor enclosure, but the third, a 17 year old, 400 lb male, named Harambe, didn't. Instead, he decided to investigate this strange event that had just occurred in his territory.

According to witnesses and a videotape made of the event, Harambe appeared to behave protectively toward the boy. The boy landed in a corner, and Harambe hovered over him, looking up at the screaming crowd above him. He apparently decided to move the boy to a safer place. He did this as a gorilla would, dragging the child with him through the water by an ankle and up a ladder to a more secure place. He then righted the boy and held his hand gently while looking around for somewhere else to take him. He decided to drag him again through the water to a more secluded part of the enclosure. You can see a video of Harambe's encounter taken by a bystander and uploaded to YouTube here.

First responders interpreted the gorilla's actions differently. According to zoo officials, the responders claimed the gorilla was behaving roughly and threateningly toward the child, tossing him about as though he were a toy. Fearing for the child's life, no rescue was attempted. Instead, a decision was made to shoot Harambe as the boy sat between his legs. Harambe's dead body fell away from the child rather than on him, which would have certainly crushed him.

The shooting death of Harambe immediately sparked controversy, which neatly divided into three camps. There are those who insist that a human's life is more important than an ape's, so the zoo was correct in shooting rather than attempting a rescue. These folks justify their view either by interpreting the ape's actions as menacing and threatening, or by insisting that even if the ape intended no harm, the potential for great harm existed. Others insist that it was wrong to kill an animal that had shown no sign of trying to harm the child but instead was trying to protect him. They demand to know why a rescue was not attempted by, say, lowering a rope or halter to the child while keeping a rifle trained on the ape in case anything went wrong. That, they insist, would have allowed for the possibility of a win-win outcome. The third camp includes those who were more interested in assigning blame to the zoo for it's presumably inadequate habitat barriers or to the mother for her perceived negligence.

Controversies aside, however, there are three lessons to be learned to avoid these tragedies in the future.

1. We vastly underestimate the intelligence of apes, and vastly overestimate their predilection for violence.

Gorillas are highly intelligent, intensely social, and for the most part peaceful. Primatologist Frans de Waal describes them this way:

I should also clarify, since people on Facebook have said that gorillas are dangerous predators, that this is entirely wrong. A gorilla doesn’t look at a human child as something edible. The species is not interested in catching moving objects the way cats are. Lions or tigers are predators, but gorillas are peaceful vegetarians. They prefer a juicy fruit over a piece of meat any time of the day. The one thing that reliably makes a gorilla male mad is another male who enters his territory or gets too close to his females and young. Haramba surely knew that he was not dealing with competition, hence had no reason to attack.

There are several previous cases of toddlers falling into gorilla enclosures, one at the Brookfield Zoo in Chicago and another at Jersey Zoo (UK). In both cases, the children survived the attention of the apes, in one case even receiving assistance from them. At Rotterdam Zoo, a gorilla jumped the moat to get close to a woman who often visited, and also here the incident ended without a gorilla death.

2. If they are that smart, then they can be trained (like children are) on how to respond to this kind of situation.

Rather than fretting over how to make the barriers stronger, higher, and more dangerous in order to keep humans out, why not capitalize on primate intelligence to develop a strategic training response to this kind of situation? Apes are already trained by zookeepers to return to their indoor enclosures when they hear a particular call or alarm, as the females in Harambe's group did. So why not train them to do the same thing when something unexpected drops from above into their enclosures? Lifelike mannequins or other human-like objects could be used in the training. Or, for the truly courageous, trained personnel who can be quickly lowered and raised via halter.

3. The ingenuity of human children should not be underestimated.

If there is a way over it, under it, around it, or through it, a child will find it. So zoos must ensure that barriers are unclimbable. Even with such a fence, however, assume that there is an appreciably non-zero probability that a child, a teenager taking a selfie, or a drunk adult is going to fall into the enclosure at some point in the future (see point 2).

4. In crisis situations, people too often fall back on a "humans are more important than animals" bias that leads invariably to tragedies.

Once this bias is activated, the likelihood of seeking win-win, nonviolent solutions to threatening or potentially threatening situations plummets. Some people deliberately invoke this bias to justify killing animals even when humane solutions are possible.

Conclusion: The case of Harambe in many respects is a modern day version of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. Fear seems to have been the primary factor underlying the decision to shoot rather than attempt a rescue—fear of a gorilla's superhuman strength, fear for the child's safety, fear of the unknown. The best antidote to fear-based decision-making is information. The more we know about other species and how they view the world, the wiser we can be in our decisions regarding them.

You can find fellow PT blogger Marc Bekoff's comments about this incident here. Dr. Bekoff is an ethologist and co-founder (with Jane Goodall) of Ethologists for the Ethical Treatment of Animals

Copyright Dr. Denise Cummins May 31, 2016

Dr. Cummins is a research psychologist, an elected Fellow of the Association for Psychological Science, and the author of Good Thinking: Seven Powerful Ideas That Influence the Way We Think.

Firstly, this was a senseless tragedy. Tragic that a young healthy male of an endangered species lost his life as a result of human stupidity. Sadly, having viewed the video and listened to a number of observations from those qualified in animal behavior, and great ape behavior in particular, I have to say that if the desired result was to retrieve the child alive and not gravely injured, there was no other choice. If we could maybe work harder at training humans to behave more intelligently and compassionately to all living things we wouldn't have to "train" other animals to avoid being killed by us. What we do know about Gorillas is that they should not have to view the world from a concrete enclosure being gawped at by lesser apes. Our unnatural, cruel and selfish behavior is what killed poor Harambe. Let's get to work on training humans so that no other animals fall victim to our selfish, murderous stupidity. RIP Harambe.

I take it you are neither a parent nor a person well-versed in animal cognition.

Building a structure that can keep a young child out is more difficult than you might imagine because they are extremely clever and can be extremely determined. As I point out in the article, there was a 15 foot drop into the gorilla enclosure, yet this child saw fit to jump into it anyway. Parents are only too painfully aware of just how much trouble toddlers and young children can get into despite your best efforts to childproof the world.

With respect to "anthropomorphizing", people who are most critical about attributing cognition and emotion to other species are usually also those who know the least about them. There is a considerable body of scientific facts regarding the cognitive and emotional capacities of various species, most particularly nonhuman primates.

The layperson goes to a zoo and sees mindless apes bumbling about and responding "by instinct". A primatologist goes to a zoo and sees apes making kinship and rank distinctions, engaging in problem-solving, forming alliances on the basis of reciprocal obligations, communicating with each other gesturally, engaging in deception to manipulate others, caring for offspring, and so on.

In other words, an educated mind sees a wealth of intelligent behavior that the uneducated mind misses. That does not prevent the latter from making sweeping claims about "anthropomorphizing animals."

Two of your comments were removed because they consisted mostly of insults and baseless attacks. You state that you are an engineer, and confidently assert that animals can't be trusted to behave as trained in crisis situations. Of course, neither can humans.

You also assert that it is possible to build perfectly safe barriers that will keep children out. Yet you seem to overlook the fact that zoos have to satisfy two requirements: Keeping animals in and viewers out while simultaneously allowing unobstructed views of the animals as close as possible. These are not easy goals to satisfy simultaneously, and if visitors can't get "up close and personal" views of the animals, they simply won't come.

It seems that a bit more education is in order for you--education about primate intelligence and about the constraints under which zoos must operate. Your assertions about both indicate a marked lack of knowledge about these domains.

Here is an article about the Cincinnati's Zoo's gorilla habitat, which is state of the art and recently inspected.

There is an argument for both killing and not killing the gorilla. I will admit that the situation had an effect on the decision that was made. Fear was involved but was the fear a helpful evolutionary tool meant to protect us. Our human intuition truly exists and we feel it in our guts and shoulders and neck and anywhere else that will get our attention.

The hope is that this incident will be used so that planning and a better outcome can be made if this were to occur again. Humans are functioning at their best when they are making moral decisions.

Religion has hijacked the moral discourse for far too long, and it's time we challenged its values that we are indoctrinated with as youngsters. Religion plays a far-reaching and institutional role in shaping the moral system of a society. When I was a grammar school student at a Catholic elementary school, a parish priest visited my class one day and in front of everyone stated that a human being was worth the entire universe! He wasn't kidding. This statement practically defines humans as the single most important species on Earth, and devalues all other species as "less than" or "subhuman."

Samples of challenges:

From: Captain Paul Watson, of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, Adbusters Special End of the Year issue (2004):

His clashes with those who pillage the sea are undergirded by a deliberate, well reasoned ethic that he has been cultivating since childhood. It is predicated on the idea that the rights of human beings do not transcend those of other species. It has been shaped in response to the arrogance epitomized by the journalist who told Watson "all of the redwoods in California are not worth the life of one human being." Watson counters: "The rights of a species, any species, must take precedence over the life of an individual. This is a basic ecological law. It is not to be tampered with by primates who have molded themselves into divine legends in their own mind."

From: John Aspinall, "The Best of Friends" (1976):

The average citizen firmly believes in his own godhead and willingly swallows the sweet pabulum prepared for him by his religio-cultural chefs... That shop-worn cliché ‘The sanctity of human life’ sums it up in a phrase. This concept is probably the most damaging sophistry ever propagated. It has rooted well. The cause of the damage is clearly seen when we examine its implicit corollary ‘the insanctity of life other than human’. Edward Goldsmith in his essay ‘Religion in a Stable Society’ confirms unequivocally that by ‘desanctifying our environment it has become possible for modern society to systematically destroy itself’….

And (continued): “The sanctity of human life is the most dangerous sophistry ever propagated by philosophy and it is all too well rooted. Because if it means anything it means the in-sanctity of species which are not human.”

Derrick Jensen
WHY CIVILIZATION IS KILLING THE WORLD, TAKE THIRTEEN.

I recently shared a stage with a dogmatic pacifist, who said there are no circumstances under which the shedding of human blood is appropriate. "Violence schmiolence," he said. "I wouldn't kill a single human being to save an entire run of salmon."

"I would," I shot back.

But I wasn't happy with my response. Here is what I wish I would have said, "Thank you for so succinctly stating the problem--why civilization is killing the world--which is the belief that any single human life (mine or anyone's) is worth more than the health of the landbase, or even that humanity can be separated (physically, morally, or any other way) from the landbase. The health of the landbase is everything. A run of salmon is worth far more than my life, or any other individual human life. The continuation of the existence of the great ocean fishes is worth more than any individual human life. The continuation of albatrosses is worth more than any individual human life. The continuation of leatherback sea turtles, redwoods, spotted owls, clouded leopard, Kootenai River sturgeon, all these are worth more than any individual human life...."